


hangers-on and other terminal diseases

by xXstaystillXx



Category: My Chemical Romance
Genre: Alternate Universe, Experimental Style, M/M, Sibling Incest, Unhealthy Relationships
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-25
Updated: 2020-06-25
Packaged: 2021-03-04 06:02:35
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,397
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24898876
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/xXstaystillXx/pseuds/xXstaystillXx
Summary: I couldn't grab him by the shoulders and say, "You are the closest thing I have to a friend right now," I just couldn't do that because I only thought of it the next day while walking on a different sidewalk in Connecticut. Or, as Gabby Gabby also says, I went to MoMA and I ran around in circles until I fell down and threw up.- John Bloomberg-Rissman,In the House of the Hangman, Volume Three.
Relationships: Gerard Way/Mikey Way
Comments: 4
Kudos: 15





	hangers-on and other terminal diseases

**Author's Note:**

> hey what if gw never started the band and went on to become a semifamous presence in the uber pretentious early 2000s new york art scene wouldnt that be wild and crazy. 
> 
> sidenote the links arent like external links theyll just take you to the footnotes and back which. kind of needs to happen for this to make any sort of sense. so click the links

Mikey writes, nowadays, and it sounds like this:

 _You felt good.  
Did you feel good?  
Sometimes your legs shook around the edges like they couldn't bear your weight for another second,  
even as you were running out of weight to put on them;  
your ankles became these things like the connecting parts of a steering wheel, swooped-in with  
all their sections showing. Driving you. Your tendons in bas relief, your eyes Rembrant's,  
or rather _Dr. Nicolaes Tulp's, _  
staring out from a portrait you never paid for. And maybe if  
you had done things differently you wouldn't have to describe yourself with tokens from a grab-bag labeled "art"  
(sharpied on the front; purpling black ink on white velvet like a bleached Crown Royal bag;  
not your handwriting but not his, either,  
not really, just the way he forms his letters  
when he's trying to make his hand like someone else's).  
You felt sick. Did you feel sick?  
Were you sick? _

_Are you okay, honey?  
She asked and you kept the receiver to your ear and twisted, arching your foot,  
the spare inches of white bas-relief between your black ankle sock and the perfect uncuffed unscuffed hem of your black jeans like a warped ribeye bone  
(not so on the other side; had one ankle sock and then one fancy-dress calfhigh so it was black up-and-down,  
your foot a smooth matte arc into your leg, like there wasn't a difference between the parts of your body.  
Just a swath of dried flat spray-paint that learned to walk and twist and squint at itself in a mirror). _

_Are you okay?  
You said Fine, Mom, it's alright,  
What did he send you again? What pictures? Sorry?  
And it was all very high school goth of you.  
Your black underwear, black socks, black jeans,  
black sweater cashmere and too-thin; maybe one of his, not yours but probably one of his,  
the redpink blush— eyeshadow? — you had to brush off the slickknit collar when you dragged it up off the floor._

_I was wearing white, right,  
said into the gummy receiver hot from your breath and pinned between your shoulder and chin,  
Yeah I think I know the pictures you mean. It's okay._

_Are you sure?  
And you thought, maybe, if you heard another question mark you'd swallow that phone whole leaving the chord to dangle from your mouth like a curly-Q umbilical cord—  
which— that was funny. You were speaking to your mother.  
And you looked at yourself in the knockoff Eames floor-length mirror in the living room  
(leaned back, it reflected you taller than you were;  
stretched out the low ceilings until they were vaulted, made your third-story into a penthouse;  
dragged out bricklines and water stains and crotch-height windowsills,  
and you would blame him for it—  
an Art Deco piece of shit set up right in the walkway? Who does that? —  
but both of you, without fail, checked your reflections as you walked by,  
looking out of the corners of your eyes and sticking out your jaws and watching your longer selves stalk the penthouse).  
You looked like somebody new  
which you almost were, if you were lucky,  
and your brain filled in _mysterious stranger yeah somebody to fuck yeah _without you asking for it.  
and it kind of sounded like him. His voice swooning in the corners of your head, but wait,  
not his voice, not really, the voice he uses when he's trying to sound like somebody else. _

_She said I didn't expect that to be the first time I've seen my son in years,  
and you did not say anything you turned and ran your hand over your newblack hair, slicked it to your head with showerwater,  
looked very much like a vampire. So then you were out for blood you and would burn in the sun. _

_She said I'm sorry that's not fair of me to say I just worry, honey,  
and you did not say anything you pointed your black toe and watched it tremble.  
_

__

__

_Tell me if you want to come home for a bit._

_And you did not say anything._

_Just to visit?_

_And there was that question mark  
so you should have been cramming the phone down your throat.  
But no, you said _

_Mom hold on a second_

_and set down the fingerprint-sweaty receiver and wrestled out of the fucking sweater,  
catching mirror-glimpses of your long white torso worming out of the black with your elbows sticking and pulling the knit into angles,  
hearing threads popping at the seams  
(and not caring; he could blow another one of his "paychecks" on a new one anytime he liked).  
_

__

__

_The corners of your mouth itched like mosquito bites;  
your chest was a heaved-in line and you didn't like it, how it led straight into your face  
which was bare and looked like a child's in stage makeup.  
And without her staticky phoneline breath muzzing into your ear you started to wonder  
if you really had to put the fucking effort into convincing her. If you really needed to.  
Could you make yourself?  
_

The End. New page. A whole stack of New Pages and The Ends and he never shows it to anyone. Someday he will put it in a chapbook and send it to his “friend” two blocks over, the one who likes to think of his loft as a publishing house, and it will get a title stamped on the cover, and the title will sound like this:

_Fuck you, Dear Brother, You Will Never Have This._

Then, only then, will he show it to everyone.

And they still fuck, nowdays; as a commentary on self imposed social boundaries and the inherent taboo of vulnerability, on a mattress on the floor with no bedframe, in a too-expensive studio apartment with the brass water pipes left exposed as a design choice. They fuck, and Gerard takes him to "parties" at freight containers that have been turned into rare book libraries and reek like cigarette smoke, where they get poetry verbally thrown at them by tipsy fags in black turtlenecks; Gerard talks with his hands about, like, the parallels between _Notes on Camp_ (1964) and _The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living_ (1991). 

Mikey looks like this, nowadays: Unemployed. Dyed black hair that he forgets to trim, brown stubble he mostly forgets to shave. Isolated, in a way; not fully, because sometimes, about three times a week, Gerard barrels in for a halfhour to grab an old portfolio-or-brush-set-or-cigarette-holder for his new friend— Gracie-Or-Samantha-Or-Brian who just _desperately_ needs one but does _not_ have the money for it, poor thing— and Mikey manages to get a word in edgewise, asks, Does his forehead feels hot? Does he look pale? And Gerard just clucks his tongue and calls him a hypochondriac, kisses his cheek, and then he's blowing out the door again. 

He stops going to the parties. He spends more time alone in the apartment with his mugs of cold brew, his wool gloves, and it makes him feel like shit to stay there in this exploded, Gerard-coated space— his thick bloody red hair dye clotted in the bathtub drain, his walls plastered with pieces that would give Wrightson nightmares, his blown glass ashtrays and his signed record sleeves without the records— but he doesn't have much a choice. 

The options for his construction of self go:  
1\. A homebody, who lives with no one but this bright, scalded afterimage of his brother, or  
2\. A sick and sweaty yet loyal pup who wobbles around behind Gerard as he buries himself in his grand, beautiful, oil-paint spackled delusions of emotion and human nature.

So fuck, what’s the point of pining. If he had been the older one then maybe they wouldn't have had to move to New York. Maybe he'd have been able to say, Hey, follow me. Nebraska. Somewhere cold. Oregon. Portland in another state, getting the basement-made handbag bootleg feel that comes with the confusion of towns and cities, the address, the Wait, you live where? from passerby— motionless ones, not people passing you on the sidewalk because who the fuck tells them where you live1 but the passerby you're _supposed_ to tell where you live, the ones you meet once at an Opening or a Party or a Gala or an Exhibition that you have to introduce yourself anew to while they stand and stare— maybe they would have had that instead of subways and apartments, gunshots in the morning, people that weren't his brother walking down the street in feather boas and his brother, yeah, his brother walking down the street in a feather boa. He wouldn't have his memories of how Gerard used to be flitting around the edge of his vision like a stranger, someone from a past he kind-of-maybe-perhaps-one-day sold for a pittance and a mattress on the floor of a studio apartment and he's bitter, yes, just because that's the recognizable thing about him now. How he's not a memory. His hair and his boa and his fucking shoes, women's shoes that make him a couple inches taller than he ever needed to be, used to be flat bottom sneakers and nothing else— used to forget to wear socks under there and so his ankles would be red and rubbed bare of skin along the roundline of his achillies tendon2 and he wouldn't care that it hurt, those holepunch slices taken out of the first three layers of skin, he just kept wearing fucking sneakers without socks— but now he doesn't have scars from the blisters and he wears thick wool socks all the time and gets mad when Mikey mixes up their pairs and wears his because they’re _expensive._

Now it's just him walking, and he's always three feet ahead which is funny, right, it's funny because Mikey's got the long legs, shouldn't he be the one coasting ahead? Going a little bit further, little bit faster? Mikey slouches back, walks slow like some sort of monolithic thing on wheels, the stones of a monument being moved, he's always so curled over, even when he's standing up, even in motion— his wrists bent in around the filter of a cigarette, fingers cupped, sheltering a match-flame from the breeze? That, but fullbody and constantly. And even when he's laying down Gerard is bent back (and yes that can mean arching and clutching the sheets but, not now, leave that be), where Mikey is a bent-bar chainlink fence sagging at the edge of a golf course Gerard is wooden pickets, Salvation Mountain wooden pickets; not white but covered in thick crackling bubbled layers of acrylic, setup too-straight to where it tips in the other direction. Chest puffed like he never had scoliosis in the first place. Like he trained himself out of it, like he trained his body to go in the opposite direction, he saw the S-shape of his spine and said No, actually, I want that to be— to be a J, maybe? Does that work? Another fucking letter of the alphabet? (and when you hit the question marks that's no longer Mikey imitating Gerard in his head, he does not ask questions like that, it's him second-guessing his own recreation of his brother). But it doesn't matter because he controls it now, what fucking letter shape his spine is in, what does it matter, huh, why not an A, huh, a fucking G for his name, a G and then a period and then W-A-Y, see if you can make your fucking bones your own signature, Gerard, why the fuck not if you're going to go all the way. God knows you're trying already. 

And his boa whips around in the wind and sometimes it does look like an S, and sometimes it looks like a J, and sometimes it looks like nothing at all, or it looks like a snake. It looks like a snake he's strangling himself with and that's the most recognizable thing about him; he could be choking himself as we speak. But, no, it’s the fact that he is choking himself as _he_ speaks, spitting out the words faster than he can keep up with them, having to gasp for air at the end of every sentence like it's the last thing he'll ever do— like it's the most important thing he is doing, and maybe it is, but.

He still walks faster than Mikey 3, his shoes still click the concrete, which doesn't make sense because concrete shouldn’t carry the resonance that well. It picks up his noise out of the holster and shoots into the sky as it does for the sleek-dress long-hair women rapid-firing past but, hey, he does it without heels, because _spiritually_ — said like a taphall debate over souls and animals and cultural appropriation— he is wearing heels. Spiritually, his head is fifteen feet above at all times, and it's going to stay there like a bloodorange balloon following him around, brushing through clouds, ruining the shapes other people point at and name while laying on the grass having picnics, checkered fabric, Walt Whitman,  
_I celebrate myself, and sing myself,_  
_/ And what I assume you shall assume,_  
but before assuming before singing for _Mikey_ for fucking _now_ maybe maybe someday he'll quit walking fifteen feet ahead. Not "above" in real life because for what he thinks of himself he cannot walk on air and make high-heeled _pow pow pow_ noises on nothing, but "ahead", not five foot ahead or ten foot ahead or any other of those multiples ahead because now, yes, right now he's always throwing words over his shoulder that Mikey cannot hear over the noise of the fifteen-ten-five feet between them as he slouches and rolls and pretends to be a stonehenge rock, he acts like he does not know Mikey, like he does not want to know Mikey4, trying to pretend they're not together until they get into a gallery or a building or anywhere where people can stop and stare and not hold up traffic as they do it (not that Gerard would ever consciously consider the flow of people down the sidewalk, throwing his hands as he is).

When they are inside and out of the flow, then he is all over Mikey, will be touching him— hand in his coat pocket from behind, chin on his shoulder, fingers loosely clutching the clean line of the slacks he picked out for him and wrinkling the wool— again like nothing ever happens, or has happened, like they never stood five foot apart on the sidewalk while Gerard talked to no one and Mikey could not hear him do it. Because it's about the audience, or it isn't. Maybe it will turn out that Mikey is very lucky and he does not actually know his brother's brain inside out, maybe it will be that he only _thinks_ he can pry apart those grey walnut folds and read with his fingertips every secret part of him. People are wrong all the time; Mikey could be wrong, God above, perhaps the softest most deep-down tissue in Gerard's brain that he could not touch without killing him reads _It's about you, the act and the audience is an excuse to touch you, and not something I do so if people— with their doe-eyes and feedbag-purses— come up and ask I can say_ We're brothers _, and then laugh and smile at their confusion, at how they are eating out of the palm of my hand,_ but no, it happens every time, he never says _We're married_ like he did when they first moved and reinvented themselves so there is nothing in his head that Mikey hasn't read enough times to memorize.

Because isn't the name of the game to impact others? Don't you want to make them feel? Look, Gerard says without saying, We are still here, we are still together, we can acknowledge the physicality, we can make a satire of what used to be our souls.5

————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————

1\. And here, real quick, to clean the slate before we get into it; Mikey did, once, while he was wandering the streets searching for something to remind him of what his brother used to be, he grabbed a man in a folded tweed suit by the elbow and told him _My name is Michael James Way and I live in apartment three-oh-five of the Mulberry Apartments building and the door is unlocked because neither of us know when we are coming home and we keep losing our keys and losing sleep waiting_ , and the man pulled away and called him a freak and that was for the best because if Mr. Tweed Suit had nodded like the things he was saying meant something the two of them probably would have been murdered in their sleep, so, good, but at the time Mikey thought he should have grabbed someone with more willingness in their eyes. But enough of that.

2\. And here is where you think of Achilles and Patroclus, right, remember that? Remember when they caught the tail-end of that specific mythology class stumbling in from the boy's bathroom not holding hands but bumping pinkie fingers and getting caught truant, and remember how his eyes lit up at that part— the Patroclus part, the secret, the teacher mouthing out And maybe they were lovers I don’t believe it myself— and he painted nothing but arrows and blood for weeks, arrows caught in grips, arrows being pulled out, not plunging in. But you already knew that.

3\. And here, with _faster_ and his name put right next to each other, you remember, probably because of the Achilles thing, when Gerard had a Greek mythology phase, how before they even got to high school and could take the class he was into it; they had a whole month where he called Mikey _Nike_ like the brand of shoes but he didn't mean the shoes, he didn't mean his flat bottomed sneakers, he meant the Goddess of Victory, that armless idol, and even though it was a girlgod and Mikey resented that a little bit he'd let Gerard call him _Nike_ in front of their parents and they would just think that he was saying Mikey. So they could get away with it and maybe that was a bit of a precursor to things that came later on. But that doesn't need to be said.

4\. And here is where you’re supposed to think about Gerard How He Used To Be, how Mikey knew him so well he could have it sit on the underside of his tongue like a dissolvable pill, a communion wafer taken the wrong way because they are not really catholic and after it all started they could not go in churches without Mikey’s stomach roiling and churning like it knew the things they did to each other and it was trying to spit _him_ up, the things they did just like Achilles and Patroclus, just like the weird armless marble shape Gerard liked to contort Mikey into. But that doesn't mean anything nowdays.

5\. Take a break, you. Come on in. It's almost over; the other day Mikey was walking down a street like any other, and it was a place that could have been anywhere, and he doesn't remember anyway because he just floats through life like a ghost, like a cut-string balloon, and he saw two kids walking down the opposite sidewalk, shoulders almost touching, knuckles brushing with each swing of their arms so that you'd think they were holding hands at first glance and at second glance know they wanted to be, and it shoved up so _much_ into the back of his throat like the dirty grey plowed snow in the gutters, packed together to choke him, and he's surprised he didn't dry-heave on the spot because they weren't Gerard and him, they'd never be him and his brother because he lost that chance, and their hair looked like it was tangling together in the wind, matting, and it was dusty middle-tone brown against black, and they were so close and he was sick with it and he wanted to go up to them and shake them and tell them everything he never said to his brother when he had the window for it.

**Author's Note:**

> some of the lines in this were contributions from two dear friends of mine (scooby and someone who doesnt want to be outed) so just know i dont get all the credit. most of it. but not all of it


End file.
